The big haul

Last Thursday I received a call from the flower shop across the street to pick up some "stuff". This stuff turned out to be a bucket of out-of-bloom orchids that I had previously told the owner about with respect to them dehydrating. The bucket contained 6 orchids (2 cattleya, 1 oncidium intergenic, 4 phals) and pretty much took me the majority of last Saturday to clean and pot. Such a nice thing to give them to me to rescue instead of to dump them in the garbage.

While I'm optimistic about the survival of most of them I'm really in doubt about the survival of the cattleya as the rhizome and roots are quite black. Is it some kind of sickness or is it just because the rhizome was previously cut in a manner that has facilitated such blackness? Hope someone can help.

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Here's a picture of my complete collection including the new guys introduced in this thread (in the second picture on the bottom).

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OMG..Your growing set up is TOO NICE!

What direction do your windows face? East maybe?

Looks like that it may have been kept too wet. Catts like to dry between watering but it looks like it should survive. Did you remove any dead, soft roots?

Nice set up!

I removed as much dead stuff although I do like to keep the dried out roots a bit longer since they had some parts that were still alive. What do you usually do with the roots that are good but have a section that is black (where they're broken or a little mushy)?

The window with the blinds is facing East so I guess I have a bit of North and South exposure too with the smaller windows.

I cut off the mushy sections only and leave firm sections of roots that have bad spots.

Catts in spag need to dry out THOROUGHLY (check for crispy spag) before watering again. Spag works well in hot climates like Texas..but could be the death of a catt in Canada (never plant your dowiana in spag )

The catt looks good. Just remove all the dead mushy roots and repot.
There are enough pseudobulbs there to sustain the new growth until they can produce new roots.

And yes your growing set up is too clean.

I've removed everything from sphag (except for a falcata and a Lou Sneary (in bloom so maybe it'll go in bark after)). I have even moved all phals to fine fir bark as sphag is enemy #1 for me.
I hate repotting plants that have been potten in sphag too as it takes forever to remove all of the stuff, especially with oncidium size roots.

The cattleya was in coconut husk chips that were severely degraded and were just as much of a pain to remove than the phals and oncs in sphag. The new growth on the cattleya is not solid and when I softly squeezed it some brownish water came out, so I hope it'll make it or pop a dormant eye along the rhizome somewhere else. As long as I get something new to grow and stay healthy I can chop it off at a later point in time to save the plant (it'll need some roots first though).

My setup has to be clean as it's in the livingroom of a 1 bed apartment Just dreaming of the day that I'll have an extra den for my babies.

If the new growth is squishy that might be bacterial infection beginning. By all means, treat the plant with something.

I've doused it in a neem solution when potting and will repeat every two weeks. As you might know there is no Physan 20 in Canada and I'm still looking for a proper substitude to bathe new plants in, any suggestions? I almost purchased some fungicide (in addition to the neem oil) but the sales person said that neem oil should do the trick...